SOURCE: “Re-Reading Alice Childress,” in Staging Difference: Cultural Pluralism in American Theatre and Drama, edited by Marc Maufort, Peter Lang, 1995, pp. 32-7.

In the following essay, Schroeder surveys the reasons for the critical neglect of Childress's work—especially on the part of feminist critics—and urges a reassessment of her oeuvre.

Until quite recently, playwright and novelist Alice Childress has received relatively little critical attention. When her plays attracted scholarly notice at all, it was often the sort that labelled her work in a limited way, thereby ghettoizing her plays and paving the way for further critical neglect. She has been described, for example, as a didactic black activist sometimes given to “sermonizing” (Gelb 23, Oliver 105) whose plays “would be better if she did not assault race prejudice at every turn” (Abramson 204); as a sentimental writer of melodrama (Barnes 30) whose plays look “like a story wrenched from the pages...